Volume 1

Practical grocer : a manual and guide for the grocer, the provision merchant and allied trades / by W.H. Simmonds ; with contributions by specialists, trade experts and members of the trades ; illustrated by a series of separately-printed plates.

  • Simmonds, W. H.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Practical grocer : a manual and guide for the grocer, the provision merchant and allied trades / by W.H. Simmonds ; with contributions by specialists, trade experts and members of the trades ; illustrated by a series of separately-printed plates. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    confections, and possessions of simple ingredients; by which means many and various ways of dealing and trading passed under the denomination of groceries: and indeed this city and nation do in a great measure owe the improvement of navigation to merchants originally exercising their mystery, as trading into all foreign parts from whence we have received either spices, drugs, fruits, gums, or other rich aromatic commodities.” That the practices of “corners” and “trusts” of late days are not new under the sun may also be discerned from the preamble . of the Act 37, Edward III, which declares that Grocers engrossed “these merchants called grossiers do by covin and by orders made amongst themselves in their frater- nities or gilds engross all sorts of wares whereby they suddenly raise the prices of them”, and that they had laid up “other mer- chandises until they had become dear”. However, the “grossiers” formed their Company; and the first volume of the Minutes of the Company recorded, partly in Norman-French and partly in Old English, how 22 persons, carrying on the business of pepperers in Soper’s Lane, Cheapside, met at a dinner at the Abbot of Bury’s, in St. Mary Axe “xij daie of Juyn, in the yere of oure Lord Jhu’ mlle cccxlv”, and elected Roger Osekyn and Lawrence de Halliwell as their first governors or Wardens, appointing at the same time a priest or chaplain to celebrate divine ordinances for their souls. That the grocers were men of position and trust is shown by the circumstance already mentioned, that in the fourteenth century their Warden Churchman obtained for the Company the joint custody with the City of the “ King’s Beam ”, the original form of the Custom House. In 1450 the Company was also selected to provide the City with an officer to exercise the important . . function of “ Garbeller of Spices and Sotill Ware”, an inspectorship of high antiquity, the object of which was to prevent the adulteration of spices and drugs. In 1453 the tariff of charges at the Company’s Weigh-house enumerates nearly forty articles of which the grocers then had the weighing and inspecting, and most if not all of which they themselves imported and dealt in. These goods included and Food Overseer. “Pepper, saffron, cloves (clowes), mace (mac), greynes, cynamon, gynger (by the case or bale), long pepper, flowre of alman, currants (reysens of Corent), gynger (ye barel ye c), tyn (the peece), led (fodder), galyngale (ye bale ye e;, druggs (any wit), woad (ye balet), mader, alum, foyle or rooch (ye bale), horns